UFO Hacker to be Extradited to US
?
The House of Lords in the UK has decided to extradite Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who got in to several US military, defence and NASA computers, to stand trial in the United States.
?
McKinnon has been fighting extradition since 2002, since it was discovered hat he?d hacked his way in to one of the US?s most sensitive networks ? reportedly from a friend?s aunt?s house ? between 2001 and 2002. He is alleged to have caused US$900,000 in damages to computers located in 14 states.
?
Amazingly McKinnon did all this without being an expert at high-level hacking, and even more amazingly, he didn?t look at military secrets or sensitive design plans ? instead he tried to unlock the mysteries of the universe and find out if UFO?s and aliens were real. Since his case started he ha revealed that his search was successful and that he uncovered photographs of alien spacecraft and the names and ranks of ?non-terrestrial officers?.
?
However, the US government has rubbished his claims and said that he left a note on an Army computer criticising US foreign policy as government sponsored terrorism.
?
In the indictment against him, the U.S. government accuses McKinnon of handicapping it in the aftermath of September 11.
?
“The entire network of 300 computers at NWS Earle, located in Colts Neck, N.J., was effectively shut down for an entire week. … [F]or another three weeks afterward, military personnel and government civilian employees at NWSE were only able to send and receive internal e-mail. It was only approximately a month after McKinnon’s last intrusion into the network that NWS Earle was able to automatically route Naval message traffic and access the Internet,” according to the indictment.
?
The reason for McKinnon wanting a trial in the UK is because he believes the US will trial him as a terrorist. The House of Lords rejected this argument, but he still has the right to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
?
?That McKinnon was able to access secure government information using basic hacking software is not all that remarkable,? said Matt Shanahan, SVP of marketing and strategy for AdmitOne Security.
?
“In most cases, when people hack into a system — the vast majority of the time — they are able to get in because reasonable controls were not in place,” he said. “In the case of McKinnon, there were a number of devices the systems administrator had not set.”
?
?A highly fragmented systems administration environment, together with the fact that a lot of controls are manual, usually results in some vulnerability,? Shanahan said. “People usually forget to set something, or they are using a virtual machine that might not have been set up correctly and then copies the same mistake 100 times,” he explained.
?
“McKinnon was able to find, and then take advantage of, these vulnerabilities.”
?
?What is worrisome is that high-level professional hackers still have ways to access these systems if they want to,? said Bill Johnson, CEO of TDI. “We have become a big proponent of securing the computer baseboard manager controller, or BMC.?
?
?The BMC is network-accessible once a hacker can get past the firewall, and it allows command and control of the main motherboard. Even systems in NASA would be vulnerable to this method of attack,” noted Johnson.
Leave a Comment